Recent Shootings Spur Pastors to Call Out White Supremacy

For many evangelicals, it’s time to name the evil beneath the violence.

With two mass shootings making national news over the weekend, responses from evangelical leaders shifted from mourning the tragic events to naming the evil blamed for recent attacks.

Several pastors spoke up to decry the racism and white supremacy that, according to an online manifesto, motivated a gunman to attack a Wal-Mart in the border city of El Paso, Texas, killing 20 people and injuring 26 more on Saturday. That night, another mass shooting took place at a bar in Dayton, Ohio, though authorities have not determined a motive.

“As president of @SWBTS, I want to be clear that we condemn in the strongest possible form any and all ideologies of racial/ethnic superiority/inferiority that fuel the kind of hate evidently motivating the #ElPaso shooter to commit such a horrific act of violence in our state,” tweeted Adam Greenway, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

Multiple Southern Baptist leaders echoed Greenway’s remarks, and others—including leaders like Denny Burk and Andrew Walker—shared a National Review editorial that targeted white supremacy as the root cause of America’s mass shooting problem:

… the patterns on display over the last few years have revealed that we are contending here not with another “lone wolf,” but with the fruit of a murderous and resurgent ideology—white supremacy—that deserves to be treated by the authorities in the same manner as has been the threat posed by militant Islam.

The El Paso tragedy marks the second US attack this year involving a young white man who named the New Zealand mosque gunman as inspiration (as did the California synagogue shooting suspect back in April). According to reports, ...